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Detail, side A from a Silician red-figured calyx-krater (c. 350 BC–340 BC).

Ancient Greek comedy was one of three principal
dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece
(the others being tragedy
and the satyr play).
Atheniancomedy is conventionally
divided into three periods, Old Comedy, Middle
Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today
largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, while
Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively
short fragments in authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis. New Comedy is known
primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander. The philosopher Aristotle wrote in his
Poetics (c. 335 BC) that
comedy is a representation of laughable people and involves some
kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or
disaster.[1]C. A. Trypanis
wrote that comedy is the last of the great species of poetry Greece
gave to the world.[2]

Performance

The comedies were performed in Athens in formal competitions at two
major festivals in honour
of Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility. Each festival seems to have
featured five comic poets staging a single play apiece, although it
is possible that programs were reduced to three poets for a period
due to the financial pressures of the Peloponnesian War. Poets applied to
the archon in charge of the
relevant festival for the right to participate in it. If chosen,
they were awarded a choregos, i.e. a wealthy man who funded
the performance, acting like a modern theatrical
producer.

Playwrights sometimes re-wrote their plays, producing new
versions to compete at the competitions.[3]

Periods

The Alexandrian grammarians, and most likely Aristophanes of Byzantium in
particular, seem to have been the first to divide Greek comedy into
what became the canonical three periods:[4]
Old Comedy (archàia), Middle Comedy (mese) and
New Comedy (nea). These divisions appear to be largely
arbitrary, and ancient comedy almost certainly developed constantly
over the years.

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Old Comedy
(archàia)

The earliest Athenian comedy, from the 480s to 440s BC, is
almost entirely lost. The most important poets of the period were
Magnes, whose work survives only in
a few fragments of dubious authenticity, and Cratinus, who took the prize at the City Dionysia probably sometime around 450
BC. Although no complete plays by Cratinus are preserved, they are
known through hundreds of fragments.

For modern readers, the most important Old Comic dramatist is Aristophanes, whose
works, with their pungent political satire and abundance of sexual
and scatological innuendo, effectively define the genre today.
Aristophanes lampooned the most important personalities and
institutions of his day, as can be seen, for example, in his
buffoonish portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, and in sexual and political
farce Lysistrata. It is nonetheless important
to realize that he was only one of a large number of comic poets
working in Athens in the late 5th century, his most important
contemporary rival being Eupolis.

Middle
Comedy (mese)

The line between Old and Middle Comedy is not clearly marked
chronologically, Aristophanes and others of the latest
writers of the Old Comedy being sometimes regarded as the earliest
Middle Comic poets. For ancient scholars, the term may have meant
little more than "later than Aristophanes and his contemporaries,
but earlier than Menander". Middle Comedy is generally seen as
differing from Old Comedy in three essential particulars: the role
of the chorus was diminished to the point where it had no influence
on the plot; public characters were not impersonated or personified
onstage; and the objects of ridicule were general rather than
personal, literary rather than political. For at least a time,
mythological burlesque was popular among the Middle Comic poets.
Stock characters of all sorts also emerge: courtesans, parasites,
revellers, philosophers, boastful soldiers, and especially the
self-conceited cook with his parade of culinary science

Because no complete Middle Comic plays have been preserved, it
is impossible to offer any real assessment of their literary value
or "genius". But many Middle Comic plays appear to have been
revived in Sicily and Magna Graecia in
this period, suggesting that they had considerable widespread
literary and social appeal.

New Comedy
(nea)

The new comedy lasted throughout the reign of the Macedonian
rulers, ending about 260
BC.

Actor wearing the mask of a bald-headed man, 2nd century BC.

Substantial fragments of New Comedy have survived, but no
complete plays. The most substantially preserved text is the Dyskolos ("Difficult
Man, Grouch") by Menander,
discovered on a papyrus in 1958. The so-called "Cairo Codex" (found
in 1907) also preserves long sections of plays as Epitrepontes
("Men at Arbitration"), The Girl from Samos, and Perikeiromene
("The Girl who had her Hair Shorn"). Much of the rest of our
knowledge of New Comedy is derived from the Latin adaptations by Plautus and Terence.

For the first time love became a principal element in the drama.
The New Comedy relied on stock characters such as the senex iratus, or
"angry old man," the domineering parent who tries to thwart his son
or daughter from achieving wedded happiness, and who is often led
into the same vices and follies for which he has reproved his
children, and the bragging soldier newly returned from
war with a noisy tongue, a full purse and an empty head. The new
comedy depicted Athenian society and the social morality of the
period, presenting it in attractive colors but making no attempt to
criticize or improve it.

See also

Notes

^
Aristotle, Poetics, line 1449a: "Comedy, as
we have said, is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in
the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of
the base or ugly. It consists in some blunder or ugliness that does
not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask
which is ugly and distorted but not painful."

^
Csapo and Slater (1993, 5-6). Aristophanes' The Clouds survives in a revised
version that dates from c. 420-417 BC (which was probably not
performed), while its first version was produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BCE.
Writing in the 2nd century CE in his Commentary on Hippocrates'
Regimen in Acute Diseases, Galen offers the example of Eupolis's comedy Autolycus, the first
version of which was produced c. 420 BCE, while its second version
was performed c. 418 BC.